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Just curious, what purpose does this serve/in what applications is this useful?
by efremjw 12y ago
Just curious, what purpose does this serve/in what applications is this useful?
- Serow225 12y agoIt's really useful for testing FEA algorithms/code. Tim Davis has done a ton of work developing numerical algorithms for sparse systems, his code is used by software like MATLAB and also bespoke supercomputer systems.
- efremjw 12y agoThanks guys
- AlexeyBrin 12y agoYou mean the concept of a sparse matrix ? Well, for e.g. if you use FEM (Finite Element method) you usually end up with a huge linear system which has the nice property that more than 90% of his coefficients are zeros. A sparse matrix will store only the non-zero elements, this is a huge gain from the point of view of memory usage. Similar considerations applies for using Finite Difference methods.
- frozenport 12y agoAlthough for finite difference schemes we dont usually form the matrix but rather perform convolution/ forward stencil math.
- turbojerry 12y agoThey are also at the heart of the SPICE circuit simulator[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE#Introduction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE#Introduction
- zl4000 12y agoI used it for testing Spare Matrix kernels I wrote for my Uni thesis. However, god knows why this site is considered news worthy. I mean it's the same as it was yesterday, and the day before...